


The Beginning After The End

by samyaos



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Gen, Other, zrs1, zrs1 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-20 14:51:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8253082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samyaos/pseuds/samyaos
Summary: ZRS1 spoilers and softly implied ZRS2 spoilers; takes place between 1.7 and 1.8. Sara visits Five after their night run.





	

The hinge-rusted chair beside your cot creaks and you’re awake. Your chest is tight and cold and your heart pulses too fast in your stomach and at the back of your neck so you imagine a box and breathe around the edges. It works a little bit. 

You’ve not yet gotten used to apocalypse-thorough darkness—the med tent’s edges are barely illuminated by starshine and the radio tower’s red-eyed blink. Whoever’s with you shifts in their chair again, but you can’t make them out. 

“It’s just me, Five,” (your heart slams the alarm button again) “your pal Runner Eight. Don’t mind me—just go back to sleep.” 

Yeah, right. “That’s, uh … that’s not gonna happen, Eight.”

“I’ve carried Janine and Sam off to their bunks,” she continues, “though I doubt they’re sleeping. Lord love em but I doubt either of them have gotten a full eight hours’ sleep in their life.” Eight crosses an ankle over a knee and her gun glints red and then gone, red and gone. Somehow she catches your eyes on it. “Just a formality, Five.”

“Right." You’d gotten the sense that Eight was a bit Byronic for enduring formalities. “I’ve already been threatened plenty tonight, Eight, with guns and everything. A lot of guns.”

“It’s not a threat,” she says. “It’s assurance—for you.”

She strikes a match and lights the pine-scented candle set on a stack of medical texts beside your cot. “Maxine says you’re not infected, and there’s no one better qualified to say so than she is—but here you are in quarantine, just in case. And if I were you, Five,” she says, “I’d want there to be someone ready, just in case.”

She leans back. “Maybe you’ll return the favour someday.”

The pine and the matchsmoke and the dark starlight and Eight’s slow breathing remind you of camping in forests with friends—you know, before. You let yourself linger there for a moment and your body sinks into your cot and the next thing you know, it’s morning and Eight is gone.


End file.
